<p>What's the best (most applicable/useful and recruited) undergrad major for management consulting, especially for firms like mckinsey/marakon/mercer/bain/bcg/booz?</p>
<p>(Aside from econ at WHYPMS)</p>
<p>Possibilities:
1. Engineering (what kind?)
2. Econ
3. Math</p>
<p>mckinsey likes finance and accounting majors.</p>
<p>What about management (strategic management) or entrepreneurship?</p>
<p>From what I've heard best majors math/econ/engineering or any other hard major like physics or compSci. </p>
<p>They consider most business majors(especially management majors) to be jokes, however if you go to a top business school like Wharton you will of course have no problems.</p>
<p>The statement above that the consulting firms consider business majors "a joke" is completely false. I'd be interested in the basis for this statement--since I have friends at McKinley, Bain, Deloitte Consulting, and Bearing Point--and they are all business majors and finance majors (primarily MBAs like myself). Oh, and I've worked in consulting (either at consulting firms or running my own firm) for over 20 years.</p>
<p>For a perspective on who consulting firms really want to hire, I suggest people check out Vault's book. In the book "Vault's Career Guide to Consulting" they point out that MBAs make up half of consulting firms' hires.</p>
<p>It's also important to note that there are five different types of consulting: strategic consulting (like McKinsey, Bain, & Boston Consulting), Operations Consulting (handled by companies like Deloitte Consulting and Bearing Point and Accenture), Information Technology Consulting (Protivity, Hudson, Jefferson Wells, Taos), E-Consulting (Digital River, Sapient) and Human Resources Consulting (Hewitt, Mercer). Then there are "boutique" firms that focus on industries (energy, insurance, etc.), functions (mergers & acquisitions, turnarounds,etc.), or methodologies (shareholder value, options, etc.) Marakon is an example of a "boutique" firms.</p>
<p>Internal consulting is also picking up--although these, obviously, aren't separate firms. Some large firms with internal consulting groups are American Express, Johnson & Johnson, and JP Morgan Chase.</p>
<p>P.S. As an example of a top business school that placed a lot of undergraduates into consulting, consider UVA (Virginia). Approximately 28% of their McIntire's Commerce School went into consulting last year. Most of these majored in either Management (UVA has an excellent strategic consulting concentration under the managment major), or finance. (This was second only to those going into I-banking--about 34% of the graduating class).</p>
<p>+1 Calcruzer, I wouldn't see a reason why business majors aren't appealing as consultants.</p>
<p>Calcruzer.</p>
<p>Thanks for the productive comment.</p>
<p>What do you think can entrepreneurship major get into consulting? And which one will be more productive blend for consulting, entrepreneurship/finance or entrepreneurship/ strategic management?</p>
<p>excellent CAlcruzer! very insightful for those of us trying to narrow down our options in consulting</p>
<p>Calcruzer I'm talking about undergrad major. MBA has nothing to do with that-- at all. If you go to a top business school like UVA you can major in business, I'm trying to give advice for those in schools outside the top20. </p>
<p>Don't major in management,entrepreneurship,etc. because it is considered a joke. A high-GPA engineering grad will destroy a high gpa business grad, particularly at below top20 schools in opportunities in Consulting.</p>
<p>Surely you would agree with that??? I mean go anywhere outside the top 20 or 25 biz schools and look at their Consulting placement and it's laughable.</p>
<p>I'm going to georgetown and majoring in management...bad idea?</p>
<p>management is.. ehh..
major in finance or accounting.</p>
<p>straight from Mckinsey's Undergrad Business Analyst FAQ's: </p>
<p>"While a keen interest in business is critical, a business degree is not. Our analysts have degrees in many fields, including liberal arts and sciences. In fact, the majority of Analysts have degrees outside of business or economics."</p>
<p>Another Quote:</p>
<p>"McKinsey interviews analyst candidates from a variety of undergraduate sources, including large state colleges and universities and smaller, private educational institutions. We also interview master’s candidates with limited work experience for the Analyst positions."</p>
<p>Also, please don't go to a school like Georgetown and waste four years by majoring in management.</p>
<p>so going into consulting i am already goin to do a double major one with a BS in Management with an emphasis in Finance. so my question is for the other major. stats, math, econ or bus man with emphasis on management/admin/entreprenuer,which would be best for a future career in consulting?</p>
<p>banana, you're not in college yet.</p>
<p>macsheesh that doesn't make his advice any less valuable in this case. A B.S. in Management is literally a B.S. in bs(if you see where I'm going with this...)</p>
<p>The MK 99 and bananaphone:</p>
<p>Let's take a look at how McKinsey puts together their numbers by using an example.</p>
<p>Go to this website--</p>
<p>it is the placement statistics for last year's undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania--notice that McKinsey hired exactly seven people out of the school last year. Go to page 45 of this 47 page document to get the exact majors each student had.</p>
<p>Note that all seven listed their majors on this site: </p>
<p>All seven said their primary major was something besides business:
one was anthropology, one was environmental studies, one was history, one was international relations, two were political science, and one was psychology. Now look at what they listed as their minor or joint major. Five listed finance, one listed marketing, and one listed Health and Society.
So, this means that none of these people count as business majors--but six out of the seven have major coursework in business.</p>
<p>Now, let's look at page 44 of this same document and start looking at where the consulting group starts:</p>
<p>Look and see how many people in this group have Economics or Business majors or major coursework in this area--and let's contrast this against those with only engineering degrees or math degrees and no business or economics coursework. I counted 39 of the 91 with business or economics backgrounds, and 3 with math or engineering majors. If you will notice, the majors besides business/econ that were most helpful in getting a consulting job were communications and international relations (between them there were 19 occurrences)--which is exactly what I have argued in many of my posts on this and other threads--that consulting is all about networking and making "pitches" and accordingly, those with excellent public speaking skills are likely to be very successful--and highly sought after. But even in this case, they were outnumbered by people with a business or economics background by a 2 to 1 ratio. </p>
<p>Also, the only reason that more business majors weren't recruited into consulting from Penn is because so many went into higher paying investment banking jobs (see pages 39-40 for the list of 120 business majors taking this route).</p>
<p>Obviously, one conclusion from looking at these statistics is that the best major for consulting would be either an Economics or a Business major with a Communications or International Relations minor (or vice-versa). And taking math or engineering would rank very low on the preferred list of majors for consulting.</p>
<p>I do agree with your assertion that getting this major from a well-known highly ranked school helps--but I doubt that's any great surprise to most people.</p>
<p>One final note that I decided to put in this separate post:</p>
<p>I'm sure someone can put up the statistics for a school like Harvard or Yale and point out that 40 analysts were recruited from these schools--and that none had any training in business--just in economics.</p>
<p>But considering that neither Harvard nor Yale have undergraduate business programs, that would hardly be surprising--nor would it prove anything about how much McKinsey (or any other consulting firm) values business training.</p>
<p>Consulting firms are going to recruit from top schools, even if it means they have to "settle" for those without business training--which I think they do not by choice, but by necessity. In this case, they will provide much of this business training on the job that the other recruits received in the classroom.</p>
<p>A B.S. is still BS if you do it in something else lol. Maybe that's why the rest of the world calls it a BSc? ;)</p>
<p>Calcruzer Im a little confused as to what your point is. Not in a condescending 'you're an idiot' way, but as in I'm genuinely confused as to what argument you're trying to make with the Penn data. I'd just like to point out, you posted the CLAS placement statistics, not the wharton statistics. Apparently 120 Penn college kids got I-Banking jobs! Here's the wharton employment report: <a href="http://www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices/wharton/surveys/Wharton2006Report.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices/wharton/surveys/Wharton2006Report.pdf</a></p>
<p>The number of students Wharton sent to various firms in 2006 (class size of 623)
McKinsey 19
BCG 8
Bain 6
Mercer Oliver Wyman 7
Mercer Management Consulting 6</p>
<p>You can scroll through the reports and see what kids majored in. A few also completed majors in the college/engineering school, but vast majority did only business majors. </p>
<p>So what that your point or does that completely contradict your point?</p>
<p>Yes, I should have been more clear. I was pointing out, in reply to bananaphone's comment, that when McKinsey recruits non-business people, quite often these people have business or economic training that doesn't show up in the statistics. I should have said that this was the College of letters and Sciences.</p>
<p>And yes, this doesn't tell the whole story--since it doesn't include the Wharton school, nor the Engineering school. But it does show that there is very little cross-training with CLAS and Engineering, but a lot of cross-training between CLAS and Wharton (which is my point).</p>
<p>Thanks for helping me clear this up--and thanks for posting the Wharton numbers also (I couldn't find the link).</p>